As the death toll keeps rising after the Aug. 12 explosion at a chemical warehouse in Tianjin, China, authorities throughout the country have stepped up safety inspections of industrial facilities. However, this safeguard did not prevent an adiponitrile plant in Shandong province from blowing up days later.In Tianjin, the official death toll had risen to 139 as C&EN went to press on Aug. 27. Police have so far arrested 12 people, including senior executives from Ruihai Logistics, the company where the blast occurred. And China‰??s Supreme People‰??s Procuratorate says it has detained 11 senior officials for offenses such as dereliction of duty in their supervision of Ruihai.Meanwhile, recovery efforts are proceeding in Tianjin. Among the companies affected is GlaxoSmithKline, which operates a pharmaceutical plant a few miles from the blast site. Last week, technicians wearing hazardous materials suits were seen conducting an inspection of the facility, which, from the outside, appeared intact. A Toyota dealership nearby suffered broken windows.In an effort to prevent other accidents, Beijing has ordered stepped-up inspections of hazardous storage facilities and chemical plants throughout the country. But an explosion that killed one person on Aug. 22 at Shandong Runxing New Material, operator of an adiponitrile plant in Yantai in the coastal province of Shandong, highlighted shortcomings. According to local media reports, officials had inspected Runxing just days earlier. The government of Yantai says it is reviewing its practices.

Cockeysville apartment building was evacuated Thursday morning while hazmat crews investigated an odor that turned out to be a "combination of household cleaners," county fire officials said.

Units were called to the building shortly after 7:30 a.m. after someone smelled a strange odor in a hallway of a building on Snowdrift Court, fire officials said. Fifteen people were evaluated for minor respiratory symptoms, but none had to be taken to the hospital, fire officials said.

Residents of a Cockeysville apartment complex were evacuated Thursday morning after they complained a gas-like smelled caused them to choke.The Hazardous Materials Team later determined the source of the smell was cleaning supplies.

CHEMICALS from the biggest ice lab ever found in NSW leached into the catchment area that feeds into Sydney‰??s water supply at Warragamba Dam west of the city.

Father and son Peter and Jim Martin yesterday pleaded guilty in Parramatta District Court to manufacturing 44kg of methamphetamine at a sophisticated drug laboratory in remote bushland in the Blue Mountains.

Court documents reveal waste and ‰??methamphetamine byproducts‰?? from the lab å-polluted the Yerranderie Catchment area, a pristine water supply that flows into Warragamba Dam.

Police were monitoring the drug operation in late 2012 under strike force Hibertia and a group of dogged detectives spent weeks trekking through snake-infested bushland to carry out covert surveillance.

They were due to raid the area in early 2013 but Jim å-Martin set fire to the lab on January 9 before police å-arrived, sparking a bushfire that wiped out 50ha of national state å-forest and put lives and properties at risk.

The fallout from the August 12 explosion that decimated China‰??s Port Tianjin and killed more than 145 people continues. Government authorities have arrested 11 municipal officials and port executives accused of corruption. Wu Dai, head of Tianjin Municipal Transportation Commission, and Zheng Qingyue, president of Tianjin Port Holdings Co., Ltd and various safety officials are now charged.

Prosecutors allege the 11 officials were negligent in their supervisory role over Riuhai Logistics Co. Ltd, the company that illegally transported and stored hazardous chemicals in the port. The safety officials are accused of failing to regulate and oversee Riuhai for safety infractions and illegal operations.

Riuhai was opened in 2011 and operated without licenses for several months. Three of the company‰??s executives were arrested within a few days of the explosion. Chinese police are also investigating Tianjin Zhongbin Haisheng, a company suspected of assisting Riuhai acquire permits.

Aug 28, 2015 ‰?? Hazardous materials teams from two counties were called to Saranac Lake Wednesday night after unknown chemicals were found in a garage on a vacant lot. Crews ultimately found ‰??low-level radioactive material" on the property that they say poses no health threat to the public.

The hazardous materials are connected to a former Saranac Lake man convicted last year of running an alternative energy investment scheme.

Saranac Lake Fire Chief Brendan Keough said the unknown material was found after village crews were called to a water leak on the property in the Helen Hill neighborhood.

"It's a garage underground," he said. "There was a house on top of it that burned and was torn down a number of years ago, but they kept the garage part underneath. There's some material in the garage we're concerned about."

The lot has been owned by William Stehl, who was sentenced in January to 12 years in prison for his role in an investment scheme that bilked more than 300 people out of $8.1 million. Stehl convinced them to invest in an alternative energy source he was developing called BGX.

‰??If laboratory safety is incorporated into the criteria for research funding, safety will instantly become the first priority of universities and principal investigators‰??as it should be,‰?? Naveen Sangji writes in an email to Science Careers. ‰??Scientists should care the most about the safety of researchers, and it is our hope that the scientific community will advocate for this change.‰?? Naveen has been tirelessly making this argument ever since her sister Sheharbano ‰??Sheri‰?? Sangji died in 2009, at the age of 23, from injuries sustained in a fire in the University of California, Los Angeles, lab of chemistry professor Patrick Harran.

Naveen‰??s latest effort is a call for the American Chemical Society (ACS) to press for rules making safety a condition of research funding. Sheri died in ‰??a tragic, foreseeable, and completely preventable incident,‰?? Naveen told a session at the annual meeting of the ACS in Boston, on 17 August, according to a transcript of her remarks that she shared with Science Careers. She sees some ‰??hope that the future may be different for other young scientists‰?? because of the efforts of many people devoted to improving lab safety, she said in her talk, but ‰??even the most far-reaching and best-intentioned individual efforts can flounder in the face of grounded, institutional resistance to change.‰?? As a physician now doing a surgical residency, she knows something about how scientific institutions work.

Given this reality, she sees ‰??two main avenues for affecting change. The first is criminal prosecution‰?? such as that brought against Harran, which yielded inconclusive results that disappointed the Sangji family. ‰??The second, and possibly of greater relevance at this moment,‰?? she continued, ‰??is the tying of grant funding to the safety records of Principal Investigators [sic]. ‰?| In an environment where only 1 in 6 NIH [National Institutes of Health] proposals are getting funded, at a time [when] the NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins has called the NIH funding outlook the worst it has been in 50 years, why should these limited tax-payer funds go to those who conduct unsafe science? Are there not other scientists out there who are more deserving recipients of these funds?‰?? Adding safety as an incentive would quickly raise safety standards in labs across the country, she said at the meeting.

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WHAT BLEW UP IN CONROE? PUBLIC CAN'T KNOW FOR SURETags: us_TX, public, follow-up, environmental, unknown_chemical

Nearly two weeks after an explosion at a drilling fluid supplier in Conroe, officials still aren't saying what caused the initial fire, what chemicals washed into a pond or what escaped into the air.

Both DrillChem Drilling Solutions and the city of Conroe say exemptions in the state's public information laws allow them to withhold the chemical names as a trade secret. The incident triggered shelter-in-place calls to 971 phone numbers in the area and kept firefighters at bay for about 40 minutes until they could figure out what chemicals were involved.

Adrian Shelley, director of the environmental advocacy group Air Alliance Houston, called the Conroe fire a "perfect illustration" of Texas' regulatory climate.

"We have facilities we don't know are there, we don't know what's in them, first-responders don't know how to respond. Regulators don't know they should be out there monitoring," he said. "We've gone in the wrong direction since West."

The catastrophic explosion at a fertilizer distribution center in West, which killed 15 people more than two years ago, triggered calls from lawmakers and President Barack Obama for better disclosure of chemical stockpiles in communities nationwide, but Texans remain mostly in the dark.

The chairman and senior managers of Rui Hai International Logistics, who owned the warehouse in Tianjin, were among the 11 officials taken into police custody on Thursday, Chinese news agency Xinhua reported. The detained persons also included the owners of Rui Hai, who came on national television last week and "confessed" to using government connections to obtain safety permits.State lawyers said they were looking into officials from government departments, including transportation management, customs, and work safety as well as the president of a state-owned port company in Tianjin. The officials were found to have been irresponsible, negligent and lax in the supervision of the site, they added.The Supreme People's Procuratorate, China's state organ for legal supervision, said in a statement that it was probing the accused for "abuse of power" and "dereliction of duty." In China, formal arrest follows a period of police detention, after which the case is transferred to prosecutors. A trial and conviction are considered highly probable.

The fire on Saturday night was put out after about five hours and authorities said no contamination has been detected, Xinhua said. The cause of the explosion is still unknown, and the area is still under investigation.

The explosion occurred at a factory of Shandong's Runxing Chemical company, according to the official People's Daily.

Environmental monitoring showed no excessive levels of pollutants in the air outside the exclusion zone set up around the blast site, but found excessive levels of cyanide in water on Sunday.

Earlier this month, 121 people were killed in Tianjin explosions. In the wake of the explosions, more than 100 chemical companies across seven provinces were told to shut down or suspend operations because of safety violations, Reuters reported.

BELLINGHAM Nearly a day after a chemical fire broke out in a third-floor chemistry lab at Western Washington University, crews were still waiting to enter the building to figure out what happened.

No one was injured when the fire erupted around 5:15 Tuesday evening, Aug. 25, but a dozen firefighters who were the first to enter the building were sent to the hospital that night after breathing in an unknown gas, said Rob Kintzele, assistant chief with Bellingham Fire Department.

When they arrived, they entered the building, and seeing no smoke, started walking down a hallway. Within a moment, they took a few breaths of a foul-tasting invisible gas and immediately turned around to get protective breathing equipment, Kintzele said.

‰??They thought they were well within a safe zone and found in just a quick moment that they were not‰?? Kintzele said. ‰??When the door got cracked, they noticed a foul taste and smell.‰??

The large number of chemicals inside the chemistry lab had the potential to make ‰??chemical soup,‰?? so the department had the firefighters evaluated at the hospital, Kintzele said. A few had complained of sore throats and headaches.

‰??The firefighters that went to the hospital last night are not suffering from any acute illnesses,‰?? Kintzele said. ‰??We‰??ll have to be paying attention over time to see if there were any ill effects from this.‰??

Because crews had not since re-entered the building, it was still not clear what caught fire and caused the third-floor lab to fill with white smoke from floor to ceiling.

The university has hired Belfor, an emergency recovery and restoration company, to inspect and repair the building. It was expected that workers could assess the damage from the fire and sprinklers as soon as late Wednesday afternoon, Aug. 26, but a set time had not been determined.

BELLINGHAM A chemical fire erupted in a Western Washington University chemistry building on Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 25.

No one was injured, and the building was evacuated right after the fire broke out about 5:15 p.m., said WWU spokesman Paul Cocke.

Student Melany Fry was in room 370 of Morse Hall with six other students when the fire broke out.

‰??We heard a big bang and a whoosh,‰?? Fry said.

Fry said the fire started by a dry-solvent pump, which keeps water out of solvents. She didn‰??t think anybody was working with that pump at the time.

The flames were initially about 15 feet high, Fry said. All of the students got out quickly while somebody else tried putting the fire out with an extinguisher.

Firefighters responded and saw a plume coming from the building. They set up a perimeter far from the building to keep everyone away as they tried to determine what chemicals were involved.

The building‰??s sprinklers put out the fire. Firefighters broke out windows to ventilate the building, and conducted a search for anyone who might still be inside, though the building had been cleared. They later ordered an evacuation of the nearby biology building.

A hazardous materials team was brought in to examine the lab and ensure the scene was safe.

Hazmat crews and fire personnel responded to a small chemical spill Tuesday afternoon at AkzoNobel Chemicals Inc. following a chemical reaction from a product at the Cedar Springs Road plant.

Company officials say an ingredient used to make label adhesive self-reacted, generating heat and smoke. A hazardous materials team was called in as a precaution. The incident was reported just after 4:30 p.m.

A third of the drum self-reacted in an area where the chemical is stored, said Gary Hamblin, director of operations for Henkel Corp., located beside AkzoNobel.

Hamblin said Henkel worked with officials from AkzoNobel to contain the chemical.

Brian Owen, AkzoNobel site director, said both companies have trained together and have a joint hazardous materials team that responded to the spill. Owen said there was no one in the area where the spill happened, which was in an area especially designed for containment.

A Scottish entertainment centre has been evacuated after a suspected chemical leak, multiple causalities were reported.Three fire engines and 15 ambulance service vehicles were called to the scene at East Sands leisure centre in St Andrews, Fife, shortly after 1pm on Tuesday.Scottish ambulance service has said that the injured will be transported to hospital, with triage teams treating several people on site at present. Those affected are understood not to be in a serious conditions.The Scottish fire and rescue service said the leak was believed to be sodium hypochlorite, a chemical compound which becomes bleach when it comes into contact with water.The leisure centre, which has a swimming pool and flume rides, has been cordoned off and evacuated as the emergency services deal with the incident.

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